Carry Me Father No More

I received your long
letter of complaint today. I welcomed it, for I too once rebelled
against my father. The story of how my father carried me for forty
years should begin by acknowledging that I didn’t always look
over his shoulder. I slept down the hall from my parents, for example,
in a bed my father encircled with white pickets. The fence was not
high, but it kept me on the mattress. Most nights when overcome
with restlessness I walked on my knees from pillows to foot of my
bed, back and forth till I collapsed into sleep. This was something
I never wanted my father to see. Our experiences were so merged,
I needed this knee-walking to establish a semblance of independent
self.

I became more adventuresome when puberty hit. My impulse
to walk became so strong that I raised myself to my knees and balanced
along the wall at the head of the bed. Three a.m. Silence. Summer.
Air conditioning. Electricity. A car far off. Heat lightning. Within
all this near-soundlessness, I stood on one knee, then rose to my
feet. That was all I did that night. And then after months of journeys
on foot back and forth across the length of the bed,
I used my reading lamp for support, eased myself over the sharp
pickets, and stepped for the first time on my bedroom floor.

Not enough can be made of this moment. Nearly fifty
years ago. Bare feet on glossy floorboards. It was like Wilbur and
Orville’s first flight. Those first steps I took around my
room, I did not disturb a pencil on my desk, afraid my father might
deduce I walked at night.

I became more bold in my teens. When my father put
the son-sling down outside the bathroom door, I walked the hallway,
did a little dance, whatever came to mind, until I heard the toilet
flush and slipped back into the son-sling. My mother knew all about
my secret, for I confessed my ability to stand and walk, told her
how it had been hard-won at night. When my father went out without
me after my home-schooling lessons, I walked the house, spoke to
my mother face to face, but when my father’s car entered the
garage, I threw myself to the couch and awaited my return to the
son-sling.

I blossomed late as a man, understandably. Every encounter
was as unnatural as could be, and there were many encounters, for
my father carried me to other countries. Tucked away in storage
I recently found an old family photo album, selections from which
I’ve traced for inclusion with this letter. The photographs
are of my father and me at ages three, seven, nine, thirteen, on
and on, ages twenty, thirty, on my fortieth birthday. I will enclose
tracings of us at the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the
Pyramids of Giza. I have never been able to render facial expressions,
not even on tracing paper, but if I had sent the original images,
you would have noticed how my father is all smiles as he endures
my weight in that waterproof, durable, poly-blend hybrid of messenger
bag and hammock (attractively crisscrossed with reflective tape–a
touch my mother added for safety’s sake).

As you can see from the tracings, the photographs
absolutely exist, but
why would a man, even one as strong as my father, do such a thing
to his son? Why strap one’s only child into a hi-tech hammock-like
harness? Why not let me live a normal life?

My secretive knee-walking sessions might make you
think I longed to rebel, but I rarely considered my father’s
carrying impulse malevolent or absurd. From an early age, I respected
my father’s need to do what he did.

The last line of your letter, after a rampage of complaints
and accusations, states that you hope we reconcile in time for your
wedding–but first, you must understand that my father was
not a monster. I walked secretly when I could, yes, but I considered
myself blessed when carried. I peered over his shoulder as he taught
me what I know of the world. It is essential to understand the respect
I had for him, the allegiance: I honored my father. Prisoners fall
in love with their captors, and I was no different. Plus, being
carried everywhere is enviable, really, if you think about it, as
you must think about it if you’re interested in respecting
what lies within us all: me, your grandfather, your great-grandfather,
and–whether you like it or not–you.

My father died a year before your birth, but he, Herman
Spitz, was not a ruthless man. Carrying me had made his torso look
like that of the noblest elk. His legs seemed intended to propel
caravanning camels. His back was as sturdy as the shell of an ancient
sea turtle. He looked fit. Healthy. Smooth skinned. Hair black as
volcanic rock–as hard, too, in later years, thanks to styling
gel. And his strength increased year after year as he bore my final
weight of 130 pounds.

It wasn’t all wonderful, however. My father’s
presence in front of me was so constant (I am embarrassed to admit
the following detail) that sometimes I would see a paperboy and
identify with his newspapers. I’d envy the toss through open
air, the slap and skid on pavement. I envied the dispersal, the
unaccompanied entrance into a foreign household. I imagined being
laid upon a table, analyzed, then discarded. At low points I would
have traded my life for a moment lived as a newspaper. I know that
last line sounds ridiculous, but it meant something to me. I needed
the fantasy of all those words in print across my skin, so contemporary,
so functional, so temporary. Instead, it was me and my father for
forty years.

You’ve received thousands of letters from me
throughout your life. Short notes here and there. Tri-weekly e-mails
more recently. But never a long and informative letter that clarifies
why I raised you as I did. Now that you have graduated from college,
support yourself in the city, and will be a married man in less
than a month, I hope you understand that I did what I did for a
reason, and I hope the following story about my grandfather–your
great-grandfather–makes it clear why I communicated via notes
of encouragement and censure, and why for the past decade I relied
so heavily on the walkie-talkies.

Johan Spitz was a steely soldier sprinting across
a gruesome battlefield, carrying a wounded buddy who seemed to the
carrier’s senses filled with things horrendously sulfurous.
My grandfather would have loved to have ended that horror, that
stench. Oh how he’d have loved to have dropped his buddy!
But he held on, delivering the wounded from danger to safety, whereupon
his friend promptly died.

Imagine finding out that carrying someone from danger
to safety had contributed to his death, as though such heroism were
murder. Imagine how this might have affected our battle-rattled
relative Johan Spitz, home and settled into a stable existence,
taking his newborn son in his arms–light of his life, a perfect-pink
cherub, so unlike his wounded buddy–until memory (physical
as well as psychological) forces the precious little package to
the floor and no one can do a damn thing about the kid dropped on
his head who thereafter grows unlifted and pledges not to repeat
his father’s failure: he will lift weights and work construction
in the summer–mortar work–whatever it takes so his own
son never knows the ground. My father promised that as long as he
lived he’d keep his son airborne. Carry him no different than
Atlas did the world.

All my years with my father are documented in the
family album. I’ve enclosed tracings (authenticated with my
initials) as photographic proof, and yet, the authenticity of my
tracings you might find questionable (perhaps unreliable to the
point of unbelievable). You might think I drew more than I traced.
You might find the whole tracing business suspicious in general.
I would prefer if you inferred my intentions, however, rather than
be handfed a rationale re: why I traced the originals, when, with
much less effort, I could have dropped photocopies in the mail.
I would prefer if you responded to this letter with another letter
letting me know why you think I’ve opted for this tracing
process: such a response would show your respect. But I suppose
it is possible you have no idea why I traced. Perhaps you think
I have lost my mind? Or that as sole family historian I have spun
a nightmare to serve my purpose by swelling your sympathy? That
I write this fiction to make you suffer for the accusatorily cold-hearted
impertinence of your letter? That I allowed you to enjoy the unlimited,
unfettered, wholly natural movement that was withheld from me for
forty years, but now, after receiving your long letter of complaint,
I compose this response to make you feel deserving of no more than
a cage in the attic best suited for some gutter-tongued cockatiel?

If I have begun to lose anything, it is my patience
more than my mind. I traced the photographs because I wanted you
to sense the distance I felt from the world. I was no older than
ten when my father made me trace the works of Heinrich von Kleist,
Gottfried Keller, and Adalbert Stifter. Pages and pages of dense
syntactical convolution, lovingly translated from the nineteenth
century German, removed my thoughts even farther from those around
me–quite something considering the son-sling’s effect
on my psyche by the time my father instituted the tracing regimen.
Throughout my twenties and thirties, clandestine ambulation aside,
I experienced everything from behind the black-lacquered dome of
my father’s skull. My father took photographs, and often asked
strangers to photograph us. These fragmentary souvenirs I have traced
with pencil and pen to reveal the distance from reality that marks
our family’s lives.

If my grandfather represents an immediate experience
of reality, my father the photograph, and I the tracing, then who,
my son, are you?

The disbeliever? The shredder? Or the confetti itself?

But thanks to the way the tracings remove you from
reality, you might not believe my grandfather’s story about
carrying a man for miles through smoke and gunfire and strewn humanity
gone mad with bloodlust to conquer a bit of territory, all compelled
by an international trade dispute or an assassination somewhere
in a Balkan hellhole that leads to trenches and bayonets and biplanes
and young men who not long before were safe at home, awestruck by
the half-dozen automobiles in town, consumed by candy stores, shoes
coated in the dust of unpaved streets, salivating at the sight of
bare feminine ankles and wrists, ankles and wrists: all of it impossible,
especially since no photographic evidence proves that your great-grandfather
made it through without a single visible scar, all of it impossible
and inseparable from our heritage, a force that made Johan Spitz
drop his son on his head, that in turn compelled Herman to carry
me in ever-larger slings until we perfected the final version’s
specifications for my twentieth birthday.

So many impossibilities, if you think about it, as
I am now thinking about it through the semi-therapeutic process
of writing this letter. Impossible that my father carried me for
decades–that is, until the day twenty-five years ago when
I presented my father with a whispered impossibility nearly as implausible
as the story about one man carrying another on his back, only to
have the carried man die as soon as the carrier put him down.

Or so the story goes. One we can believe or not. But
the point, I think, is that our belief does not matter.
What’s important is that my father believed these stories
so entirely, so thoroughly, that he had not much space within him
for anything else. My father’s belief in his own father’s
story filled him so entirely that there was no way my father could
believe in the somewhat similar pairing of the crucified and the
cross, surely the world’s most infamous interdependent duo
(one I think you’ve taken too much to heart lately), those
stars of an implausible story that hundreds of millions have believed
in no differently than I
believe in paper and pen, another infamous interdependent duo with
which I write this letter to someone who deserves to see in the
clearest possible words why it is I’ve done what I’ve
done with you, why I so thoroughly believed in my father’s
belief of his father’s story, so my only son might one day
believe the story I tell now and better understand what it is he
may do with his own children (assuming) and what these children
may do with their own children (assuming), and so on (assuming).

As for now, enclosed with this letter and the traced
photographs you will have found the instructions for operating the
replacement of your old walkie-talkie. The new walkie-talkie, as
you will see on Tuesday or Wednesday (Monday being a postal holiday),
is not a walkie-talkie at all but the newest-fangled videophone.
It’s no bigger than your cell phone, so it’ll be an
improvement on those clunky old machines we used. The videophone
will let you see and hear me, at any moment, just as I’ll
be able to see and hear you. Please take the time to review the
instructions, considering their great expense and purported “extraordinary
functionality.”

Your whole life you have known me as a correspondent.
While living under the same roof, I always thought it essential
for our emotional and psychological stabilities to keep my distance,
secure in my locked study. You can understand now why I considered
such distance necessary, and you should realize that I always had
your well-being in mind. Now, thanks to the new videophones, we’ll
always be apart and always together. Distance, they say, makes the
heart grow fonder. Without it, I would die, not physically, perhaps,
but spiritually, whatever that might mean to you.

You say the distance between us seems unbridgeable.
Your letter describes a time when you tried to reach me in my study,
how you knocked on the locked door, how you pounded and wailed and
sobbed, how you learned to pick the lock, how when you finally managed
to open the door I forced you into the corridor and slammed the
door in your face. Opening the door only to have it slammed in your
face, above all other rebukes, you say, iced your desire to connect
with me ever again. You say your adolescence was a tyranny of miniscule
pen strokes on fortune-cookie–sized slips of paper, that you
still dream about these notes, that all my carefully composed words
of encouragement, castigation, advice, and warning you read as death
sentences, each eroding whatever capacity you had within to
love me. You say that talking on the walkie-talkies I integrated
into our relationship after you picked the lock to my study was
like communicating with someone from beyond the grave. You couldn’t
believe my voice belonged to a living, breathing human being, let
alone the man who should introduce you to the wonders of the world.
You accuse me of making your mother leave me to work at an Alabaman
orphanage, where she met your stepfather, who established himself
as a model of manliness in your life by forcing you to submit to
Christ and the cross. Yet I do not recall a word of protest from
you. I remember glee when you related your grades via walkie-talkie.
I remember Christmas mornings when you woke me with frantic pleading
to listen as you unwrapped presents. I remember your mother telling
me how you stored the notes I wrote in a piggy bank next to your
bed, as though such slips of carefully composed communication were
more valuable than coins. You say your mother has been a stabilizing
constant in your life, as she was in mine, mostly, and I agree that
yes I have been more like a satellite transmitting paternal programming
from some impossible distance. I recognize your right to complain.
I respect it. And I hope this letter and the videophones enable
a new connection, one we never would have imagined if we’d
lived in the age of smoke signals.

The videophones achieve an ideal of long-distance
communications, yet if you switch yours off and throw it in the
river, the connection that runs through you and me and my father
and his father and so on (all the way back) is not something you
can discard. You’re always connected, whether you like it
or not. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t
drop what’s inside you. But we can use these videophones to
forge a relationship we will not regret after I die. I realize that
last statement was morbid, perhaps manipulative, too. Maybe it’s
unfair to talk at this point about death and regret, the imminence
of one and the inevitability of the other. But I want you to know
that I realize how important a step it was for you to take when
you sent that long handwritten letter of complaint. I am an expert
on taking steps, having done so in secret for forty years.

But why did I wait forty years to whisper what I did
into my father’s ear? Why did I need forty years to declare
independence? I still see that day so clearly. The day I met your
mother, my father and I were making our way up Witherspoon’s
slight incline toward its concluding intersection at Nassau Street.
There we saw turn the corner an adult female of an aspect unusual
for the area (middle-aged, fresh-faced, non-white) who we’d
soon learn was a half-Haitian named Hattie. Deep in the background,
Nassau Hall sprawled as stately and as ivy-strewn as it had for
nearly two and a half centuries, protected by an endless gate of
black spears. In the foreground, father and son saw this woman come
around the corner, her hair concealed in a tight silo of ruby-red
batik. She exchanged a stunned look–a joyful one!–with
my half of the father-son combo, a look that swaddled the baby-faced,
gray-haired son in compassion, a look charged by recent years au
pairing in our preppie hometown, a look as radiant as the sun that
made it through the maples lining Witherspoon Street, a light in
which she saw me more as ideal ward than man-child out
for a piggyback.

The look we exchanged caused a disturbance so strong
it forced me to risk ridicule and make eyes at certain beauty as
it passed on the street. I risked ridicule when I did such a thing
because, other than the softball-style cheeks I had at the time,
I was, as you can discern in some of the tracings, altogether avian
(swan-necked, eagle-beaked, owl-eyed, bat-eared). I risked ridicule
because I was glowingly pale thanks to my father’s insistence
on SPF 45 sunscreen. And also I risked ridicule because I lay horizontally
behind my father’s shoulders in a high-tech sling.

Of exposure to needy children your mother had more
than her share, but otherwise she was hopelessly alone when it counted.
And staring down her fortieth year, she did not have too many dreams
left, but whenever she looked at Nassau Hall, the word orphanage
splattered across the windshield of her thought. Hundreds of sorry
heads and grimy hands popped from each of the building’s windows.
Orphans on the brain, Hattie had, until she turned the corner and
saw the sight that changed her life:

The moment she saw me slung across my father’s
back she knew she would adopt me as ward and mate, for I was her
ideal orphan.

And so, twenty-five years ago, once Hattie turned
the corner, I told him. Quietly at first, I told him. Perched on
his back, I told him. Into his left ear, I told him. Quietly at
first, then louder, I told him. Until the telling was all my father
could hear.

Maybe he had finally tired of carrying me? Maybe whatever
it was that obsessed him for forty years gave way when confronted
with Hattie’s compassion? Whatever it was, there was no struggle.
I staggered beside him before I found my stride and chased after
Hattie.

Relieved of the burden he carried on his back–and
perhaps of the affliction within him, too–my father withered.
His burden and his affliction, inside and out, had propelled him
since he’d been dropped on his head. After all those years
enduring my weight, he collapsed less than a week after Hattie turned
the corner and entered our lives.

The passion that runs through your letter shows that
you are blessed with the potential to understand the complexities
you’ve inherited. As such, you should understand that I realize
I overcorrected for my father’s overcorrection of how his
father raised him. I have often considered easing my maximum-distance
stance, but when I entertain such options my chest tightens, the
veins in my arms constrict, and an unpleasant pulsation commences
in my neck. I respect such an extreme reaction. Maybe I could overcome
it with counseling, but I doubt our family’s vicious pendulum
can ever be stopped. My grandfather Johan Spitz put his buddy down
and the wounded buddy died. My father put me down and he soon died,
too. If we were to embrace at your wedding, I wonder what might
happen to me?

I ask you to understand these words as a plea. I ask
you to respect what I have never controlled, the way neither my
father nor grandfather controlled what they did. Perhaps one day,
I will hoist you on my shoulders, even if such action passes my
burden wholly to you when I am struck dead. Whether this letter
eases or enrages, I hope you acknowledge the forces within us. And
I hope you put your mother on the videophone at the wedding. Let
her know I miss her. As I miss you. And know that–as always–I
apologize for my weakness, my weirdness, my wrenching need. I look
forward to carrying on our correspondence via the small screen,
or if you prefer, through the old-fashioned medium of the written
word. Love, I realize, is the only word this response ever required,
so I’ll write it twice more (once for each of us)–love,
love–before entering that era of vulnerability wherein I await
your reply.

Lee Klein’s writing has appeared (or will appear)
in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007, The
Black Warrior Review, The Barcelona Review, Pindeldyboz,
Hobart, Barrelhouse, and others, including the
anthologies The Encyclopedia of Exes (Crown) and Half-Life:
Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes (Soft Skull Press). Since
1999, he has edited the literary website Eyeshot.net, and
in 2006 earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He
lives in Philadelphia. (6/2007)